2. Contessa got a solid and big-tent crew of gamers together and shored up its position as the best and most important convention/event factory in online gaming. P.S. It also just happens to be completely run by women.

4. ...though Basic Red ("So why, in monster manuals bloated with 14 different kinds of vampires, far too many interchangeable reptile men, mermaids, DOLPHINS, WATER WITH A MEANY FACE ON IT, and JUST REGULAR WATER all statted up as off the shelf options to murder your players, how absolute gold like the Kappas gets lost in the shuffle?") and Goblin Punch ("They resemble huge, predatory cats with long necks (like an eel), no fur or eyes, and gelatinous flesh. Visible in the center of their semi-translucent body is a football-sized egg, which contains a embryonic princeling (very valuable to the proper sorts)" stepped up their game mightily to attempt to fill the void.

5. John Peterson--author of Playing at The World and the only actually trying RPG historian started putting out articles over at Medium featuring, y'know, research and, like, looking things up and, like, sourcing.

6. The Google Plus RPG community got awesomed-up to the point where you can pretty much generatecoold100 tables to order by just asking for ideas and letting them sit there over night.

7. Kelvin Green showed people a new and better way to put out basic adventure modules with Forgive Us.

8. The 9th World Bestiary gave everybody some cool new monster pictures and sci-fi ideas to play with, even those of us who aren't playing Numenera yet.

9. Tired, angry indies Burning Wheel Headquarters and Onyx Path put out overwrought, derivative bullshit that tanked because everybody who wasn't in the credits saw right through it.

10. The fifth edition of something called "Dungeons & Dragons" came out and exceeded expectations, rapidly becoming almost everybody's second favorite edition.

12. In July the RPG Drama Club finally slid all their pieces onto "Mess with Zak and Mandy" and failed and fucked up so hard they made a rule against saying my name on RPGnet...

13. ...despite or because of which Red & Pleasant Landcame out and kicked ass and grossed enough in a week to pay rent in downtown LA for years and more than Vornheim did in its whole run and more than most RPG products make, like, ever.

14. And finally, here at the end of all things, Topless Robot announced 2014 was the best year ever for tabletop games. As the only person to have worked on both of the products in the top two, allow me to say: you're welcome.

So: 2015, Year of the Goat--bring it. I'm gonna finish rewriting every monster in the Manual, watch my players take on a tournament of the Knights of Tiamat and write an adventure about black metal viking amazons. What are you doing?

Friday, December 26, 2014

So ok, everything you've heard about Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies is wrong.

First, you'll hear people being like "This movie sucks". They're dumb and wrong, as this short post-movie conversation with Connie reveals:

Zak: "Listen to this review: 'Bilbo Baggins is the only character capable of eliciting genuine reactions from the audience'."

Connie: "Uh, really? What about warpigs?"

Z: "What about wargoats?"

C: "What about trolls with morningstars for legs?"

Who doesn't have a genuine reaction to wargoats? Nobody I wanna sit near.

Another thing you'll here is this is not a very faithful screen adaptation.

This is a totally faithful screen adaptation--of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Which is a way better thing to be faithful to than Tolkien.

At one point Gandalf is like "These orcs are bred for only one purpose: war" and then, in like the film-editing equivalent of a typo, like one scene later Legolas is talking to some Other Extraneous Elf about some bats and going "These creatures are bred for only one purpose: war".

Now you might think "Well I have heard the script is a little weak". NO. It's just this is how fucking metal this movie is. In the grimdark screenwriting of the Fran and Filippa there is only war. And that's good, because, dude: war goats. Yeah.

Now if you've seen it you're also wondering what's up with Bilbo knocking down like three or four 10' tall orcs in a row by hucking rocks at them. What's up is Bilbo is clearly doing ranged backstabs and must be doing x 4 damage (rock=d4, average 2.5. Times four = 10, which is respectable and could probably knock down even a tough orc if they'd already taken melee damage) and they don't see him because they're in melee with other guys and it's a frenzy.

But how did he get leveled up that far because he's definitely 1st level (or even 0-level) in the first movie.

Ok check it: assuming Jackson's giving xp only for monsters and treasure (SPOILERS below if you never read the books or saw the movies):

Session 2 starts: The party finds Glamdring, Sting and other weapons in the troll hoard, plus kill some orcs on wargs. Level 3.

Session 3: A bunch of social bullshit with elves and the moon. Then the party gets ambushed--Bilbo fights a goblin, most of the people playing the dwarfs and Gandalf have doctor's appointments that day so it's mostly solo and Bilbo does the whole riddle-game with Gollum. Scores the One Ring. You can't get more than enough xp to level up once in a single session, so Bilbo goes from level 3 to level 4 without anyone realizing this is an Artifact.

Session 4: Guy playing Gandalf gets back from the dentist, the dwarves fight a ton of goblins, and the Great Goblin. Lottttts of xp for the whole group, Bilbo gets an even share. He's level 5.

Session 5: The party is chased by the White Orc and his minions--during this sequence Bilbo kills a warg, then an orc. Then there's all the pinecone business and they're saved by Gandalf casting Summon Eagles I Keep Forgetting About. Level 6.

Session 7: Elves capture dwarves. Bilbo does a lot of Move Silently which he can because he's a level 7 thief. The wonderful, inappropriate Six Flags Magic Mountain barrel-fight happens during which the dwarves kill lots of orcs. Bilbo sponges his share of this xp: Level 8.

Session 8: Ok, a lot of sneaking and talking and negotiation and Lake Town at the beginning of the session but then Smaug. Clearly the deal here is--even assuming Bard is some dumb deus ex machina DMPC--the party gets a share of xp off Smaug for shaving some hit points off before Bard's called shot to the wyrmbelly.

This leaves Bilbo at Level 9 before the Battle of Five Armies even starts. Though he is still smart enough to avoid melee as much as possible.

P.S. Jackson's Gandalf is clearly Vancian--he's out of spells for the whole third movie.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

People talk a lot as if Hasbro cares a lot if 5e does well: They kinda don't.

It's the same as how Disney doesn't really care that much if Marvel sells a lot of comics and Warner Bros doesn't care that much if DC does. They care about them as research and develoment and as intellectual property--the books don't make that much money.

As they used to say "DC can sell anything with Superman's face on it except the comic."

To the degree D&D might ever make Hasbro-Cares level money it'll be as a video game, movie or TV show--until then they just want WOTC to not embarrass them and if it spits out a few good ideas or people they can use later, that's awesome but not a requirement.

This leads to two rarely-considered effects:

-The independent RPG people are way more motivated to care about the state of the industry than the major players are. They don't even have to make that much money. Just exist.

-WOTC can afford to fuck around a little.

So what do you do? Let's take comics as an example:

The Avengers movie is like the third highest grossing movie of all time or something and Iron Man is right up there. Spider-Man is no slouch. The X-Men movie was a hit as were most of the Batman movies. This is some successful-ass IP.

But what was it built on?

1. Years of customer buy in from people who fans who are, by now, of all ages.

(For D&D?Check!)

2. Well-regarded filmmakers and media people who have a personal connection to the material--Joss Whedon for Avengers, Bryan Singer for X-Men, Tim Burton for Batman, etc.

(Check!)

3. A zeitgeist that was ready for the movie and ready to throw money behind it

(Check, these are the days of gambling on fantasy and sci-fi--even Pacific Rim got made)

4. Things that set it off from the competition in the genre

(No Check! The average viewer will, in 2014, see a D&D movie as a cheap and generic excuse for a Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movie. The brand is not differentiated in the public's mind there.)

5. A relatively recent body of work in the original medium that explored the possibilities a movie could exploit and made older fans believe the material could be handled in a way that wasn't as cheapshit as the cash-in attempts they'd seen before. Burton and Nolan's Batman were made possible not by the 60s Batman show but by Miller's Dark Knight Returns, Singer's X-Men came from Byrne, Silvestri, and Lee's work with Chris Claremont on the comic, the Avengers movie (done as a banter-heavy ensemble piece) is clearly built on Brian Michael Bendis' work on the title with Leinil Francis Yu and others.

(No Check! Despite D&D being much in the news lately with lots of genre-oriented sites talking about how cool 5e is and respected authors talking about how it influenced them, if you heard there was a new D&D movie out tomorrow, nothing WOTC has done in the last 30 years would convince anyone it was anything but another schlocky cash-in. When the Avengers movie came out, the fans were ready to believe it might be good--can D&D say the same? And perhaps more to the point: what would you show a studio exec to explain the possibilities of the franchise to a modern movie audience? Keep On the Borderlands? Fuck no. Maybe Monte's Planescape, but that's pretty far from the center of D&D.)

Put 4 and 5 together and what do you get?

D&D needs some modern classics.

If Bob Kane's Batman was the only Batman, there'd have been no Batman movies since the '60s. D&D, as a brand needs a Dark Knight Returns--something that says what--to savvy kids and obsessive grown-ups--makes what D&D can do different from what The Hobbit or Harry Potter can do.

Right now the buzz about D&D from mainstream authors and directors is based on D&D as a process and a tool--as something that sparked their creativity as kids, not D&D as a set of unique, cool ideas that stand on their own.

Now right off the bat I'll say this is a self-serving solution--what adult D&D fans, the kind who write blogs about D&D want--is exactly that: high quality auteurish content. And what I am saying is good for the company is that same thing.

So take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand: since WOTC can afford to fuck around--what have they got to lose? They've tried everything else.

If we're in a cultural moment where Serious People are looking at D&D, why not make something Seriously Cool to show them how vital it is? When Maus made people look at comics in the '80s, comics could show them Watchmen. What can you show them?

But you can't just hit people over the head with it and expect us all to believe whatever you have planned next is totally the shit--you have to build to it.

How I'd Build Up To It If I Was The Boss Of You

The main reason to use D&D instead of another system has always been its flexibility and Lingua Franca status. Parlay that into creating some fan goodwill about what D&D can do now.

The first thing I'd do if I was WOTC is publish an awesome 5e Camelot supplement. Why Camelot? It's public domain, it isn't Tolkien, it isn't core D&D and you've got Greg Stafford right there ready to write half of it. Show whoever's paying attention that D&D can do knights and damsels and a classic story it hasn't ever done right before. And don't do a cheesy D&Dified version of Camelot with a different name (you can always do that later) just do Camelot with King Arthur and everything. Just establish that you can put out cool stuff. This is low-hanging fruit. Get someone British and distinctive on the art and it writes itself: you have people who can write it, you have an audience that'll buy it, it won't cost any more than what you were going to do anyway.

It won't get much mainstream press, but it will spark fan interest. Fans will go Hmmmm....

Second supplement is an awesome Wuxia supplement with Completely-Out-Of-Left-Field anime-influenced art. Do not worry about maintaining "the D&D look" establish that D&D Owns Fantasy Roleplaying. Period. In any style or genre. If it has a sword, D&D does it. This is The Game, we own the market.

Those are easy, right? The usual fanboys will buy them because everything from D&D right after 5e comes out is exciting and the snobs like me will take a look because they're so different. So we've generated some good will and, by doing the Camelot supplement early and right, we've proven this D&D is dedicated to doing truly new things.

(And yeah, yeah, you do the things people always say to do: make plushie beholders and more board games and try to get decent actual-play films of people playing D&D. But that's obvious...)

Now this is a little harder and will cost a little more: Once those two supplements impress everyone, go ask Hasbro to snatch up some rights that've been floating around--put out a sword and sorcery supplement that shows how to make characters and stuff from Lankhmar, Conan & Red Sonja, Elric, and Jack Vance's Dying Earth. If you don't publish something about those guys every 10 years, someone else will.

After that--go for Bas-Lag and Tolkien if you can.

Ok, now you've done three things in a row that:

-Are as likely to be successful as anything else you were doing

-Didn't cost any more than what you were going to do anyway

-Didn't fuck with your core brand in any way

and

-Proved you really could do new things with D&D if you wanted

...NOW you go ahead and take a risk: you give your writers and artists (AND GRAPHIC DESIGNERS!) the same deal DC gave Frank Miller with Dark Knight Returns--you give them the money and the time and the freedom to go completely nuts with the core D&D IP. Let people with real talent loose on Dark Sun, Eberron and the Planes. Give someone the opportunity to make a beautifully intricate, beautifully illustrated Forgotten Realms sandbox with gorgeous cartography using every monster in the manual. And for god's sake get someone to make a campaign based on whatever the fuck the world of Magic: The Gathering is.

Did you split the audience by creating 5 different lines of products? So what. You need to make compelling work, and let the licensing division worry about profit. Maybe it's easier to sell people one line of supplements than 5, but it's way easier to license 5 things than one--and that's where the money is anyway.

And these are the things you show to the studio execs to prove that D&D can be a compelling and original world for the average moviegoer. And we'll back you up and believe it and carry the signal, because we all now believe things are gonna be done in a new way.

The other option is to just keep on keeping on and let us out here in indie land do all the heavy lifting. But if there's a decent Numenera or 40k or Night's Black Agents (or, god forbid, Red & Pleasant Land) movie before there's a D&D one, Hasbro is not gonna be happy.

TL;DR: Invest in real quality. Now is a rare moment where the market might actually notice and then do something about it.

The owners still subscribe to a server that runs sexist ads, the moderators still include people who claim my publisher is the spawn of the devil, and people who openly launch misogynistic attacks on women in my group are still members in good standing, but they all seem to be too scared to say a word.

Maybe they got so completely embarrassed about how gullible they were during fracas about me consulting on 5th edition D&D that our long subcultural nightmare is finally over.

Which is awesome, because with the trolls dead it hopefully paves the way for some amazing stuff on the way to be seen and talked about without having to wipe foam from anyone's face:

It is so cool to think that maybe maybe maybe enough billy goats have crossed the bridge that finally people new to the hobby can read about cool new DIY D&D stuff without having to wade through psychotic whining about how Jeff's a clueless nostalgist, Noisms is an imperialist cultural appropriator and Scrap must be hungry for your babies because she's trans.

But then I guess I shouldn't be that surprised--if you check your Chinese menu, 2015 is the Year of the Goat.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Beholders are wonderful and terrible, of course--and the several variations that the Monster Manual lists just spread the terror thin. Before you get to the actual Eye there's all these preparatory minor terrors like Spectators to worry about. Fuck that. Also, the eye-themed lair actions seem misguided.

Here's a beholder-lite (and sort of a lair action) that makes sense to me. Y'know the gas spore...

…the monster that notoriously looks just like a beholder but is hollow and filled with murder?

I assume these are bio-engineered by the beholder itself as decoys in its moist and stygian alchemical pits.*

(Also, I figure beholders--what with telekineses and no hands and therefore likely thinking of their entire environment as part of their body--are philosophers.)

But where do the Beholders themselves come from?

Do you remember that issue of Thor where he went to look for Odin's missing eye and he found it and it shot fire at dwarves and told Thor stories? Well that's obviously a beholder.

Beholders are the cast-off eyes of gods--that's why they're so rare.

When psychotic white elf alchemists get ahold of beholders, they do this with them...

*Scrap Princess has a great idea: the gas spore is a cordryceps-like fungus that takes over the eye.

OH WAIT HOLY SHIT: the Beholder itself is what happens when the fungus takes over a god's eye and the gas spore is what happens after thousands of years when it finally gets totally fungusized.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Sure, these famous artists and writers and designers like it, but what do random D&D people think?

"I spend a great deal of my time waiting with people. Waiting in courts. Waiting in hospitals. Waiting in office buildings. Waiting for someone whose hidden behind a door to walk in with a proclamation that will alter the course of the person I'm sitting next to. Distraction is key. That is where A Red & Pleasant Land comes in.

I'd say that when Zak was writing this book I doubt he was thinking that it would be used in such a manner but, let's be honest, if anyone could grok his books being read on the floor of crisis centers and in high back courtroom pews, it's going to be Zak.

People know Alice. People like games. People love stories of how there are people in the world who make things, especially when they are stuck waiting for a door to open and someone to walk in and pronounce ruin or rebirth. It makes it a little less awkward for all those involved to have something to do with their gaze. The very least this world can do is offer them something beautiful. A Red & Pleasant Land is that."

"In a year that saw the release of yet another edition of Dungeons & Dragons, A Red & Pleasant Land is nevertheless the most impressive – and inspiring – RPG book to have come out in 2014. It’s wittily written, beautifully appointed, and, above all, bold in the way it reworks its source material to create something at once recognizable and original. Even if you’re not the least bit interested in adventuring in Wonderland, consider taking a look at A Red & Pleasant Land simply as an artifact. It’s a reminder of just how much energy and creativity is to be found in the old school/DIY gaming scene these days."Here

"It may be the best thing to come out of a small press RPG publisher ever."

Here (David's post isn't public, so if you don't believe me and aren't one of the 2000 people in his circles, ask him)

If you're curious about what's actually in it--there is an extended review here --along with a sample of what it's like to use the tools inside to generate an adventure location.

If you want to hear what it's like from a player's point of view, there's a nice write-up here.

Yeah, ok, that is just a bunch of random internet people but on the other hand: zero disappointed customers so far. Just think: hundreds of gamers have been looking at this pdf for six whole days and still not found anything to complain about.

Monday, December 8, 2014

So the party was rolling up on this castle tucked away in the excellent Shoe Thief map Jez drew for Red & Pleasant Land* which I have defaced with…

…"Pale King's knights fighting decimator".

Being hungry for adventure--and noticing the decimator had 60,000gp worth of gems embedded in its wrists--they decided to intervene.

So:

IN THIS CORNER, REPRESENTED ON THE TABLETOP BY THE RANCOR…

The Decimator

Colossal Avatar of Ona -- a deity of indeterminate gender and variety that snuffs out illumination in all forms. Particularly hates books, and it's priests punish speaking with death. Paradoxically also associated with light, but in forms like Cherenkov radiation and white phosphorus. (Ona invented by Odyssey)

The megalethality of the monster did what I wanted--it forced everybody to work together...

So Brian wasted no time casting Reverse Gravity...

…and now an interesting situation obtains: the spell's radius is smaller than the height of the Decimator, so he was reverse-gravited from his nipples to his toes but the top of him was fine.

(Also note Reverse Gravity has a ceiling of 100' in 5e.)

This cleverness freed everybody up to start artillerying the now-floating decimator, who had to make a Dex Save Vs Bryan just to move on account of having to use its big paws to walk.

Still, that left it with two attacks doing 2d30 each per round, and it (that is: I ) figure out it could throw pieces of castle at people….

At least until they disintegrated its right arm, at which point all it could do was hold on with its left and kick stuff.

Oh, and do the silence then darkness then death thing.

Kerowhack came through with a natural-20 with a dagger for 44 points of damage (non-spellcasters add their entire d20 roll to damage) and Mariah used locate creature during the darkness rounds.

There were a few close calls (Rolling d30s for damage creates so much tension at the table it's amazing. Try it. Stokes was down to 4 hp at one point and I rolled a two. Everybody exhaled.) but only Gypsillia fell afoul of the death aura, mostly because she was trying to climb into its butt and timed the rounds wrong --quoth Gypsillia: "Trying to get into a Decimator's butthole is like doing double-dutch".

Mandy shot a blade barrier at it in the dark and missed, then Stokely used Bigby's hand to shove it towards the barrier and that was the end of the Decimator.

So she's up there in the sky at zero hp, floating against the 100' anti-gravity ceiling along with dozens of shredded chunks of colossal flesh.

Someone had featherfall and cast it just as the spell wore off--allowing Gypsillia to avoid becoming Flatsillia and then healing her up.

Good job, team…though since they used so many of their best spells I surrrre hope there's not another one….

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Last I checked Red & Pleasant Land was disappearing at faster than a copy a minute--at the current rate they will be gone in two days. Anyone who's tried to scrounge up a print copy of Vornheim knows how hard it is to get your hands on these things once they disappear.

But don't take our word for it! Here's what the rest of the free world has to say:

China Miéville (author of Perdido Street Station and The Scar)

"How lucky are we? Once again we get to experience the artistry and art, the cantankerous smarts, the dissident gaming philosophy of Zak S. It's inadequate to call Red & Pleasant Land brilliant. With alchemist swagger, Zak takes the base matter of well-worn fantasy standards and our cheerful nerd hobbies, and makes the strangest gold."

"God, it's so beautiful, I love this. It just makes D&D look so fucking now."

Kenneth Hite (author of Qelong and Night's Black Agents)

"It should be next to impossible to do anything original with Dracula or Alice, but Zak S demonstrates instead that it's next to impossible for him to put out a bad game book. He trails his barbed artistic and gaming sensibilities through these two modern myths and emerges with something more than a mashup or a collage: it's a necromantic restoration of a nightmare that never was."

Monte Cook (author of Numenera, Ptolus, The Strange)

"Zak is not just imaginative, he's bold. Which means that while he recognizes the value of fantasy traditions, he doesn't hesitate for a moment to throw out anything that's become tired or dull. Going to Zak's blog is like opening a window to let in fresh ideas when the room is full of only stale, trite, conventional ones."

Keith Baker (creator of Eberron)"ZAK SMITH'S IDEAS ARE... (d100)1-21. Intriguing22-49. Innovative 50-62. Insane63-92. Indispensible93. Warm & Fuzzy94-95. Torn through a wormhole from a dystopian future that can only be stopped by the timely intervention of a Nordic cyborg96-100. Roll twice and use both results. "--Keith Baker

Vanessa Veselka (journalist, author of PEN-prize winning novel Zazen)

"Let me be plain in case it is not obvious; you want Zak Smith as your GM....Zak unfolds one mind-blowing illustration after another. Art is never absent from anything he does. The world we are in was once the site of a giant castle roughly the size of a continent. Worn to its roots now, all that’s left is the foundation of old power structures.There is a Red King (who dreams of an Antiland) and a Heart Queen (who is cruel) and a Slow War. One name for this place is “The Land the Gods Refuse to See.” It has mirror portals that lead to a Quiet Side of the glass where you go “unplayably insane,” a reminder that Zak uses Lewis Carroll like manga uses the atom bomb, as inspiration for a terrifying and wondrous landscape…"

…in Matter.

Charlotte Stokely (star of Skater Girl Fever and Not Too Young For Cum 4)

"Groovy"

-

The new, deluxe Death Frost Doom--the classic fantasy module that I started my campaign with--is also out. James had me completely re-write it.

When a freakishly original thing is made, it inevitably contains both inherited and mutant genes. When the original Death Frost Doom was found on the doorstep of the old school gaming scene, its horror-short-story tone and structure came thinly wrapped in familiar adventure-game trappings. James and I agreed that this new edition should maintain that tone and structure, but replace as many of the handed-down bits as possible with more creepy magic.

When I first read James' Death Frost Doom, I considered it not just the best module I'd ever read, but the only usable one I'd ever read. It demands only a little of your campaign's space and time, but it does something with every inch of that space and every second of that time. I've tried to keep it as disturbingly efficient as it was when I first met it five years ago--when it helped kick off the campaign I am still running today (and when it caused most of the trouble the characters have been dealing with since).

I think we've done no violence to it, and given you and your players a few more toys to play with. And smash.

So go buy things. There's a package deal on shipping, too, so literally, this is the best time to pick up anything else you might want from LOTFP including the must-have Carcosa hardcover (which not nearly enough people own) and new ones like The Idea from Space and No Salvation For Witches.

I am extremely pleased with everything we've done here. It's been years of effort to bring this to you. These are days the like of which will not be seen again.